Match the words up with their meaning and give the Russian translation

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pastime	able to think in a reasonable, sensible way
pursuits	being practical and sensible
per se [ֽpə:'sei]	description of life as it is
pottering	small and uncomfortable
goggle at	trick, hoax, insincerity
mortal	smth that you do regularly for fun in your free time
terrestrial	considered by itself
menial ['mi:niəl] job	an activity that you enjoy
pokey	to seem to be similar to something or related to it in some way
down-to-earthness	doing things in a slow and enjoyable way
matter-of-factness	to look at smth being very surprised or impressed
artifice	an ordinary person who is not especially successful, intelligent, rich etc.
warty-realism	earthly, existing on the Earth
bear resemblance to	dirty, boring or low status work
sane	showing no emotion when dealing with something upsetting, exciting

Exercises

A. Fill in the blanks with the suitable words and expressions.

Pastime, goggle at, mortal, terrestrial, pursuits, per se

What is Jimmy’s favorite ____________ ?
Their athletic ____________ include rowing and skiing.
It’s not that I don’t like her ________ , it’s her friends that exasperate me.
Stop __________________ that skag!
Mere ___________ will never understand the logic of the gods.
We have 15 ____________ channels. The rest is only accessible via satellite.

B. Answer the questions using the following words and expressions:

Bear resemblance to, menial job, down-to-earthness, artifice, warty-realism, sane

How did he earn money in college?
What qualities in a doctor do you like?
What would you do to avenge the death of your loved one?
Are you an idealist?
Do you think some books use the same plot with the same heroes?
What is considered normal behaviour in subway?

GRAMMAR

1. WILL может использоваться для обозначения часто повторяющихся действий в настоящем:

Every day he’ll come home, watch TV and drink beer. – Каждый день так – придет он домой, включит телевизор и пьет пиво.

TRANSLATE

On any given evening or weekend, in at least half of all English households, someone will be ‘improving’ the home, with bits of wood or tins of paint, or the garden, by digging or just ‘pottering’.

2. Выражение YET ANOTHER / MORE + NOUN значит ЕЩЕ ОДИН/ЕЩЕ БОЛЬШЕ:

Yet another reason for doing this is that we need the money. – Еще одна причина, по которой мы должны это сделать – это то, что нам нужны деньги.

TRANSLATE

For the rest of us ordinary mortals, television seems to promote the art of conversation, providing the socially challenged English with yet another much-needed ‘prop’.

So-called ‘reality TV’ provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, of English social inhibitions, and what a psychotherapist would probably call our ‘privacy issues’.

3. Выражение THAT IS, выделенное запятыми, значит ТО ЕСТЬ:

This in not usual among felines, that is, cats. – Такое обычно не происходит среди животных кошачьей породы, то есть котов и кошек.

TRANSLATE

We tend to make jokes about the things that frighten us (we humans, that is, not just we English).

4. Выражение FAILING THAT ( WHICH ) переводится А ЕСЛИ ЭТО НЕ ВЫШЛО/ВЫЙДЕТ:

It is necessary to pass the test failing which you will not be admitted to the university. – Надо сдать тест, а если не получилось, то в университет вы не попадете.

TRANSLATE

When it is not possible to make saving claims – when you have indisputably paid full price for something undeniably expensive – you should ideally just keep quiet about it. Failing that, you have two options, both very English: either apologize or moan.

5. Выражение PROVIDING ( PROVIDED THAT ) значит ПРИ УСЛОВИИ:

I will invite him provided that he apologizes. – Я его приглашу при условии, что он извинится.

TRANSLATE

English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, and triumph.

6. Выражение NOUN + IF THERE WAS ONE значит ВОТ ЭТО + СУЩ ТАК СУЩ!

He is not poor (an understatement if there was one), so he can afford to buy this house. – Он не беден (назвать его таким – это преуменьшение из преуменьшений!), так что он может позволить себе купить этот дом.

TRANSLATE

At the top national and international level, sport has become а cut-throat business, and there seems to be more focus on winning and on the exploits of individual superstar ‘personalities’ (a misnomer if ever there was one), than on notions of team spirit and sportsmanship.

7. Оборот AS LONG AS значит ПРИ УСЛОВИИ, ЧТО:

You can take this book as long as you return it tomorrow. – Вы можете взять эту книгу, при условии, что завтра вернете.

TRANSLATE

It is acceptable occasionally to refuse a drink during the round-buying process, as long as you do not attempt to make a moral virtue out of your moderate intake.

MATCH UP DIALOGUE PARTS

PART 1 (first sentence)

What’s his favorite pastime?	What can he professionally do?	When we went out to eat, her down-to-earthness discouraged me. She wanted to go to cheaper restaurants and did not like to be complemented at all on her looks.	Us mere mortals will never understand how the stock exchange works.
You don’t like this job, do you?	I really admire the matter-of-factness with which he inform-ed us about the loss of his inheritance.	I dislike the artifices she used to get the job.	He runs out naked, he yells at people, he steals… What can we do?
Wow, what a beauty!	He wants to look like a movie-type cowboy.	I watched that documentary. I agree that kids should not be allowed to see it.	How are his driving skills?

PART 2 (reply, reaction)

Well, I’ve been a broker for 20 years and I still don’t.	So how come you proposed to her?	That was the aristocratic part in him speaking.	The only sane solution would be to institutionalize him.
Not much. He’s wasted last 10 years doing menial jobs.	Well, he drives in a rather pokey way, but he’s careful and willing to learn.	Well, I don’t like the job per se, but the people I have to work with…	Stop goggling at her, your wife’s about to look at you.
Don’t worry. It’s the professionalism that counts. Soon the boss will discover her for what she is.	I noticed. His clothes do bear a close resemblance to the ones of Clint Eastwood’s in “A Fistful of Dollars”.	His pursuits are many and all are altogether aristocratic: horseback riding, polo, squash…	Yes, the warty-realism of this kind of cinematic art is perhaps too much for little kids to bear.

RULES OF PLAY PART I

I am using the term ‘play’ here in a very broad sense, to mean any leisure activity: pastimes, hobbies, holidays, sport – anything that is not work, anything that we do in our spare time.

PRIVACY RULES – PRIVATE AND DOMESTIC PURSUITS

Homes and Gardens

Watching television is a universal pastime – nothing uniquely English about this. Nor is there anything peculiarly English about the other main domestic leisure pursuits mentioned here, such as reading, gardening and DIY, or at least not per se. There is, however, something distinctive about the phenomenal extent of their popularity, particularly in the case of DIY and gardening. On any given evening or weekend, in at least half of all English households, someone will be ‘improving’ the home, with bits of wood or tins of paint, or the garden, by digging or just ‘pottering’.

Television Rules

The sort of people who claim that they ‘never watch television’ are usually trying to convince you that they are somehow morally and/or intellectually superior to the lumpen masses who have nothing better to do than ‘goggle at hours of mindless rubbish’ every night.

For the rest of us ordinary mortals, television seems to promote the art of conversation, providing the socially challenged English with yet another much-needed ‘prop’. In a recent survey, television programmes came out as the most common topic of conversation among friends and family, even more popular than moans about the cost of living. Television is second only to The Weather as a facilitator of sociable interaction among the English. It is something we all have in common. When in doubt, or when we have run out of weather-speak starters and fillers, we can always ask: ‘Did you see . . . ?’ With only five terrestrial channels, the likelihood is that many of us will have watched at least some of the same recent programmes. And despite the relatively high quality of English television, we can nearly always find something to share a good moan about.

Soap Rules

Our social inhibitions and obsession with privacy are also reflected in the kind of television programmes we make and watch, particularly our soap operas. The most popular English television soap operas are highly unusual, utterly different from those of any other country. The plots, themes and storylines may be very similar – the usual mix of adultery, violence, death, incest, unwanted pregnancies, paternity disputes and other improbable incidents and accidents – but only in England does all this take place entirely among ordinary, plain-looking, working-class people, often middle-aged or old, doing menial or boring jobs, wearing cheap clothes, eating beans and chips, drinking in scruffy pubs and living in realistically small, pokey, unglamorous houses.

Why is this?

The answer, I think, lies partly in the empiricism and realism that are so deeply rooted in the English psyche, and our related qualities of down-to-earthness and matter-of-factness, our stubborn obsession with the real, concrete and factual, our distaste for artifice and pretension.

But this is not sufficient explanation.

My hunch is that this peculiar taste is somehow closely connected to our obsession with privacy, our tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves, to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge.

There is a forbidden-fruit effect operating here: the English privacy rules mean that we tend to know very little about the personal lives and doings of people outside our immediate circle of close friends and family. It is not done to ‘wash one’s dirty linen in public’, nor is it acceptable to ask the kind of personal questions that would elicit any such washing.

Sit-com Rules

Much the same warty-realism rules apply to English situation-comedy programmes. Almost all English sit-coms are about ‘losers’ – unsuccessful people, doing unglamorous jobs, having unsatisfactory relationships, living in, at best, dreary suburban houses. They are mostly working class or lower-middle class, but even the more well-off characters are never successful high-flyers. The heroes – or rather, anti-heroes, the characters we laugh at – are all failures.

I am not trying to claim here that English comedies are necessarily better or more subtle or more sophisticated than American ones or anyone else’s. If anything, the humour in most English sit-coms is rather less subtle and sophisticated than the Americans’, and usually considerably more childish, crude and silly.

The important question, it seems to me, is not whether our comedies are better or worse than other nations’, or cleverer, or cruder, but whether they have some distinctive common theme or characteristic that might tell us something about Englishness.

(…) I did eventually arrive at an answer: as far as I can tell, almost all of the cruder type of English television comedy, as well as much of the more sophisticated, is essentially about that perennial English pre-occupation: embarrassment.

Embarrassment is a significant element in other nations’ television comedy as well – and perhaps in all comedy – but the English seem to have a greater potential for embarrassment than other cultures, to experience it more often, and to be more constantly anxious and worried about it. We tend to make jokes about the things that frighten us (we humans, that is, not just we English), and the English have an unusually acute fear of embarrassment, so it is not terribly surprising that so much of our comedy should deal with this theme.

‘Reality-TV’ Rules

So-called ‘reality TV’ provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, of English social inhibitions, and what a psychotherapist would probably call our ‘privacy issues’. Reality-TV bears little resemblance to what any sane person would regard as ‘reality’, as it generally involves putting people in bizarre, highly improbable situations and getting them to compete with each other in the performance of utterly ludicrous tasks. The people, however, are ‘real’, in the sense that they are not trained actors but ordinary unsuccessful mortals, distinguished only by their desperate desire to appear on television.

WRITE A DIALOGUE WITH THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS BELOW. TOPIC: YOU AND YOUR FRIEND ARE DISCUSSING YOUR FAVORITE PASTIMES

pastime

goggle at

mortal

terrestrial

pursuits

per se

bear resemblance to

menial job

down-to-earthness

artifice

warty-realism